Drug Turns Immune System Against All Tumor Types

sciencehabit writes, quoting an article in Science: "A single drug can shrink or cure human breast, ovary, colon, bladder, brain, liver, and prostate tumors that have been transplanted into mice, researchers have found. The treatment, an antibody that blocks a 'do not eat' signal normally displayed on tumor cells, coaxes the immune system to destroy the cancer cells." The abstract and full paper are freely available. It seems fairly promising: "In mice given human bladder cancer tumors, for example, 10 of 10 untreated mice had cancer that spread to their lymph nodes. Only one of 10 mice treated with anti-CD47 had a lymph node with signs of cancer. Moreover, the implanted tumor often got smaller after treatment — colon cancers transplanted into the mice shrank to less than one-third of their original size, on average. And in five mice with breast cancer tumors, anti-CD47 eliminated all signs of the cancer cells, and the animals remained cancer-free 4 months after the treatment stopped."

Comments

Re:But...

[Gravis Zero]

Sure, but in the cases where it works you eventually come away neither dead nor wishing you were dead. So your options are

A. Take the drugs, wish you were dead, then get better, then feel fine

B. Don't take the drugs. Be actually dead.

ahem...
C. Don't take the drugs. Be actually dead. Come back for BRAAAAAINS!.